Deepset: Following the Trail of DR LINK, Fast Search and Transfer, and Other Intrepid Enterprise Search Vendors
April 29, 2022
I noted a Yahooooo! news story called “Deepset Raises $14M to Help Companies Build NLP Apps.” To me the headline could mean:
Customization is our business and services revenue our monetization model
Precursor enterprise search vendors tried to get gullible prospects to believe a company could install software and employees could locate the information needed to answer a business question. STAIRS III, Personal Library Software / SMART, and the outfit with forward truncation (InQuire) among others were there to deliver.
Then reality happened. Autonomy and Verity upped the ante with assorted claims. The Golden Age of Enterprise Search was poking its rosy fingers through the cloud of darkness related to finding an answer.
Quite a ride: The buzzwords sawed through the doubt and outfits like Delphis, Entopia, Inference, and many others embraced variations on the smart software theme. Excursions into asking the system a question to get an answer gained steam. Remember the hand crafted AskJeeves or the mind boggling DR LINK; that was, document retrieval via linguistic knowledge.
Today there are many choices for enterprise search: Free Elastic, Algolia, Funnelback now the delightfully named Squiz, Fabasoft Mindbreeze, and, of course, many, many more.
Now we have Deepset, “the startup behind the open source NLP framework Haystack, not to be confused with Matt Dunie’s memorable “haystack with needles” metaphor, the intelware company Haystack, or a basic piles of dead grass.
The article states:
CEO Milos Rusic co-founded Deepset with Malte Pietsch and Timo Möller in 2018. Pietsch and Möller — who have data science backgrounds — came from Plista, an adtech startup, where they worked on products including an AI-powered ad creation tool. Haystack lets developers build pipelines for NLP use cases. Originally created for search applications, the framework can power engines that answer specific questions (e.g., “Why are startups moving to Berlin?”) or sift through documents. Haystack can also field “knowledge-based” searches that look for granular information on websites with a lot of data or internal wikis.
What strikes me? Three things:
- This is essentially a consulting and services approach
- Enterprise becomes apps for a situation, department, or specific need
- The buzzwords are interesting: NLP, semantic search, BERT, and humor.
Humor is a necessary quality which trying to make decades old technology work for distributed, heterogeneous data, email on a sales professionals mobile, videos, audio recordings, images, engineering diagrams along with the nifty datasets for the gizmos in the illustration, etc.
A question: Is $14 million enough?
Crickets.
Stephen E Arnold, April 29, 2022
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